Publishing magnate Walter H. Annenberg has donated Vincent Van Gogh's "Wheat Field With Cypresses" to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Annenberg, the former U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, said he recently paid $57 million for the 1889 scene of a wind-swept landscape beneath a roiling sky. Annenberg said he acquired the work from the family of Swiss industrialist Emil G. Burke. "It is one of the great paintings I have admired over the years," Annenberg said.

An unsigned painting initially valued at $83 sold at auction in Tokyo for $550,000 after it was revealed to be a previously unknown Vincent van Gogh work. The hammer fell after only five minutes. The 1884 oil painting, a dark profile of a frowning peasant woman, went to the owner of a Japanese art gallery. Shinwa Art Auction had estimated the value at $83 but asked experts at Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum to examine it. They faxed word Thursday that the work was a Van Gogh.

Miniature replicas of Vincent Van Gogh's "Sunflowers," "Self-Portrait as an Artist," "The Potato Eaters" and other Van Gogh paintings will be shown at the Carole & Barry Kaye Museum of Miniatures. The museum has commissioned Paul Saltarelli to re-create the works in one-twelfth scale in celebration of the Amsterdam Van Gogh Museum exhibition coming to Los Angeles in January. The miniatures will be exhibited from Oct. 17 to April 4, at the Kayes' museum, 5900 Wilshire Blvd. Hours are 10 a.m.

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam opens an exhibition this week showing the influence of Japanese art on the 19th century Dutch painter. "Japanese Season" features artifacts from Japan similar to what Vincent van Gogh might have seen when they were exhibited in Amsterdam in 1883. Afterward, Van Gogh became a collector of Japanese prints and often wrote to his brother, Theo, about his desire to infuse the motifs into his own artwork.

A Dutch museum dedicated to the life of Vincent van Gogh said Thursday that it had unveiled a newly discovered letter by the 19th century painter, shedding fresh light on his turbulent life. The two-page letter, written Aug. 3, 1877, was recently discovered in a private collection and has gone on temporary loan to Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum. The museum, which houses more than 200 of his paintings and 600 drawings, said it was the first previously unknown Van Gogh letter to surface since 1990.